In celebration of Valentines Day, my co-teacher and I took the day off from formal instruction and decided to have our kids rotate amongst a few different stations we had set up around the room. As much as I wanted to decorate a mailbox and watch it fill with candy and warm fuzzies (and I guess, you know, have my students do the same), that isn't really a thing they do here. (Also, they don't really need the extra candy) I talked a little bit about Valentines Day and how we celebrate our loved ones in the U.S. (Goal 2, what what!). In preparation I'd downloaded a ton of free worksheets from teacherspayteachers.com but only really used 3 of them. Our focus skill was "utilizing reference texts", so most of the stations had them using a dictionary or thesaurus. Of course we had to have a Valentine Card station, so at that station I had them focusing on different writing skills. Lastly I just want to take a minute to express my love to everyone back home supporting me. I received 2 wonderful care packages on Valentines Day and was definitely feeling the love. I couldn;t do this without you guys. If you look closely, you can see the goodies you guys have been spending me in some of these photos...
In 2008 I spent a fantastically fun 8 weeks working as a residential summer camp counselor. The other counselors in my unit and myself worked primarily with youth going into grades 5 and 6. Over the course of those 8 weeks, we saw and heard these kids say some pretty ridiculous things. A fellow counselor recently reminded me of a quote book us counselors kept. Highlights include, “Look what I found in my butt!”
As I find myself spending a whole lot of time with 6th graders (duh), I’ve begun to realize this is less a campers-say-funny-things trend than a 12-year-olds-say-funny-things trend. The other day we were working on a KWL chart as a class. We have done this many times, and the students are pretty familiar with the process: jotting down things we Know, Want to know, and eventually, what we Learned about a specific topic “What does K stand for?” I asked everyone, feeling confident that they’d all yell out with the correct answer. Instead I get only a response from the principal’s son, “Kentucky!” It is times like this where I just start laughing and lose any façade of authority I might have held. I don’t know how teachers take themselves seriously. Yes, K stands for Kentucky. As I regained composure, I led the students through a preview of our next selection, How To Babysit an Orangutan. They were instructed to page through the story’s photographs, and with a little background knowledge, tell me what they knew about orangutans. Most of the responses fell along the lines of “They live in the rainforest,” “orangutans stay with their mom until 8,” “they climb in trees”. One exceptionally observant student raised his hand. “Yes, Taket?” “Their feet look like hands.” Yes, yes they do. |